Category: Internet of Things

Have you seen this article? It’s about the project Soli from the Google’s Advanced Technologies and Projects (ATAP) group. They have implemented a new way to comunicate with a computer: through radar. The radar captures the slight movements of the hand like in this picture, where just moving your fingers in the air makes you move a ‘virtual’ slider.

This report coordinated by Nesta and commissioned by the European Commission, DG CONNECT is the first systematic network analysis of the emerging digital social innovation (DSI) ecosystem in Europe

The study began 18 months ago with the research of the principal digital social projects. They used crowdmapping to map all the identified actors, who are entrepreneurs that use digital tools to tackle a particular social issue. There are initiatives in domains like health, creating websites to share information on particular diseases and to improve patients’ well-being by creating a sense of inclusiveness in a community, or like e-government to let citizens express their opinion or to suggest policies, to name a few.

The study has also focused on identifying the links between the organisations what allowed them to do a link analysis of the situation and come up with recommendations to improve the existing situation. The aim being to maximize the positive impact of digital social initiatives and at the same time, create awareness of the risks of misuses that could happen.

The study explores how emerging technologies in the digital economy can transform society by the mobilisation of collective action, enable a more collaborative economy, new ways of making, citizen participation, sustainability and social innovation. – See more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/event/shaping-future-digital-social-innovation-europe#sthash.eJTDji6O.dpuf

The research shows that the identified initiatives are emerging from these 4 technological trends:

Open Hardware: initiatives here create new tools for example for environmental measurements on a critical variable

Open Networks: like connecting devices to collectively share a resource as Internet connection

Open Knowledge: websites to collectively create and analyze information. There are great examples in health and in participatory democracy

Open access, here are the open standards, open licensing and others essential to guarantee an all-inclusive Internet

Collaborative economy with crowdfunding and new socio-economic models like AirB&B

Awareness networks, to help on crisis situations and to improve behaviours or services through sharing data

New ways of making, with FABLabs and 3D printers but also designing personal configurations

Funding acceleration and incubation

All the reported initiatives are for the social good, it makes good to read about them 🙂

The main big risk reported is that Internet becomes BIG BROTHER, centrally controlled, with a few companies dominating the offer of services. On this scenario, if those main players have their power extended, they could discriminate traffic, acquire a wealth of personal data with no alternative, as people will have to accept their terms of use or be left-out, just to mention some of the consequences. So let’s sustain all DSI open access initiatives!

Innovation is creating new materials, new sensors each time smaller, cheaper, more flexible, more powerful and at the same time less power-consuming. It allows to put them everywhere: we are surrounded with devices crowded with those sensors as our phones with cameras, gyroscopes and gps. And all those measurements captured by the sensors are being used by applications, many of which are connected to the cloud and to Internet.

Internet of Things (as this technology is called) is becoming ubiquitous, leaving us each time more exposed on our daily life. How many of us have our whereabouts known by the GPS company, the Phone provider and even the car manufacturer? Also our personal biometrical information is being left all over our running paths not to mention the new gym-centers.

We need privacy to express our internal thoughts without public judgement, we need to be in a safe place to test and confront to others our lines of reasoning. On our hyper-connected world, the spaces where we can profit from this privacy are vanishing.

As for our second need, the image the others have of us is very important. The information we leave behind influences this public image and it has a great effect not only on what others think of us, but also on our own perception of ourselves, on our self-esteem and finally it ends reflecting on our happiness.

Living on this hyper-connected world in which we are immersed is a real challenge!

It (or he/she?) doesn’t need to, there is now a platform to connect to others. I wouldn’t call it the Facebook for Robots, it’s more like a giant Academia 🙂 but RoboEarth enable robots to share their experiences, their learnings. It is a Cloud environment that allows them also to use external storage and computation capabilities, that means freeing them of physically carrying the extra kilos of storage space or processor needed to execute their tasks.
See the official definition:

What is RoboEarth?

At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment. Bringing a new meaning to the phrase “experience is the best teacher”, the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.

RoboEarth offers a Cloud Robotics infrastructure, which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to the cloud and back to the robot. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models).

I think this platform will make an exponential leap on robots capabilities. It is sometimes hard for humans to learn by example, but it is not so for robots.

This 2011 Wired post from Thomas Goetz about Feedback Loops is about how we can change (or improve) our behaviour just by measuring it. I would add another factor that I think is as important to make us change, that is when we put our behavior on display. As example, if you have been on a diet, you know the valuable help of letting people know you are on a diet, social pressure will help you to keep in track and reach your goal. Thomas Goetz gives the example of showing your speed:

The potential of the feedback loop to affect behavior was explored in the 1960s, most notably in the work of Albert Bandura, a Stanford University psychologist and pioneer in the study of behavior change and motivation. Drawing on several education experiments involving children, Bandura observed that giving individuals a clear goal and a means to evaluate their progress toward that goal greatly increased the likelihood that they would achieve it. He later expanded this notion into the concept of self-efficacy, which holds that the more we believe we can meet a goal, the more likely we will do so. In the 40 years since Bandura’s early work, feedback loops have been thoroughly researched and validated in psychology, epidemiology, military strategy, environmental studies, engineering, and economics. (In typical academic fashion, each discipline tends to reinvent the methodology and rephrase the terminology, but the basic framework remains the same.) Feedback loops are a common tool in athletic training plans, executive coaching strategies, and a multitude of other self-improvement programs (though some are more true to the science than others).

Despite the volume of research and a proven capacity to affect human behavior, we don’t often use feedback loops in everyday life. Blame this on two factors: Until now, the necessary catalyst—personalized data—has been an expensive commodity. Health spas, athletic training centers, and self-improvement workshops all traffic in fastidiously culled data at premium rates. Outside of those rare realms, the cornerstone information has been just too expensive to come by. As a technologist might put it, personalized data hasn’t really scaled.

Second, collecting data on the cheap is cumbersome. Although the basic idea of self-tracking has been available to anyone willing to put in the effort, few people stick with the routine of toting around a notebook, writing down every Hostess cupcake they consume or every flight of stairs they climb. It’s just too much bother. The technologist would say that capturing that data involves too much friction. As a result, feedback loops are niche tools, for the most part, rewarding for those with the money, willpower, or geeky inclination to obsessively track their own behavior, but impractical for the rest of us.

Remember this was written 2 years ago, and at the pace of technological advances, the limitations he saw on collecting and storing personal data are not so relevant anymore.

For you, entrepreneur reader, check the article for the provided examples, and hereunder for some general ideas that can make use of this loop model:

And today, their promise couldn’t be greater. The intransigence of human behavior has emerged as the root of most of the world’s biggest challenges. Witness the rise in obesity, the persistence of smoking, the soaring number of people who have one or more chronic diseases. Consider our problems with carbon emissions, where managing personal energy consumption could be the difference between a climate under control and one beyond help. And feedback loops aren’t just about solving problems. They could create opportunities. Feedback loops can improve how companies motivate and empower their employees, allowing workers to monitor their own productivity and set their own schedules. They could lead to lower consumption of precious resources and more productive use of what we do consume. They could allow people to set and achieve better-defined, more ambitious goals and curb destructive behaviors, replacing them with positive actions. Used in organizations or communities, they can help groups work together to take on more daunting challenges. In short, the feedback loop is an age-old strategy revitalized by state-of-the-art technology. As such, it is perhaps the most promising tool for behavioral change to have come along in decades.

I like his way of turning the expression around:

[…] But as GreenGoose, Belkin, and other companies begin to use sensors to deploy feedback loops throughout our lives, we can finally see the potential of a sensor-rich environment. The Internet of Things isn’t about the things; it’s about us.